Version 3.4 (October 1, 2014)

The admin web address brings up the HTML5 GUI instead of old Flash GUI.

Fix crash when indexing some MKV files with chapters.

Version 3.3 (September 17, 2014)

Keep track of media files that lead to a crash during library indexing (typically due to those files being corrupted) so that they can be skipped in subsequent indexing. Also, the indexing is resumed automatically once the media server restarts. Given that the restart is automatic too, the software is now self healing in those crash cases.

The HTML5 web interface for accessing the media library was mistakenly used on iOS devices, this is now fixed by returning the iOS specific interface .

Fix issue with PS3 where MP4 with H.264 HD and AAC surround was not playing (issue introduced in 2.7).

Some minor GUI fixes.

Version 3.2 (August 20, 2014)

The web interface for accessing the media library has been replaced with an HTML5 interface that can play your media within the browser (for best experience please use Chrome). This is the same interface used for casting media to Chromecast but with the added capability of playing content in the browser.

Bug fixes and minor improvements:

Sharing media from Windows explorer now open the new GUI (and not the old one).

Improved error messaging in several cases (e.g. when attempting to share a mapped network drive or a network path which is not accessible to the server).

Hide the iTunes entry in the media source page of the GUI.

In the HTML5 media library interface, display the title at the bottom of video items and not just when hovering on them.

Version 3.1 (August 8, 2014)

Do not automatically unshare a folder when a USB drive on which it resides is no longer available - this feature is removed due to requests by many users.

Do not transcode the MOV format for Chromecast when its codecs are supported by Chromecast.

Version 2.4 (March 13, 2013)

Fix audio missing issues with some web content when Flash 11.4 or higher is installed.

Eliminate some rare visual artifacts for some web content.

Fix auto centering of visible area around video player for some web content.

Add Crackle and Crackle authentication.

Fix Hulu authentication.

Better Win 8 support.

Fix folder capitalization bug.

Fix edge cases with regard to duplicate upnp:icon properties.

Fix failure to return icons and art for certain devices and also to play web content (this issues arose due to overzealous security checks that were failing valid requests).

Many other fixes for rare bugs and crashes.

Version 2.3 (September 2, 2012)

Fix loss of audio with premium web content when using Flash 11.3 or newer.

YouTube is now supported in the Pro version only since YouTube prohibits direct access to the media URLs (the Pro version is using a server-side web browser and therefore does not need to access the media directly).

Version 2.2 (May 24, 2012)

New Features

Full support for various Sony Google TVs models.

Avoid transcoding blu-ray movies with devices that support them.

Improved support for transcoding Ogg Vorbis files.

Restore the ability to enter user/password for Hulu (required to access Hulu plus by subscribers.)

Restore support for RMVB.

Bug Fixes

USB drives and network drives are no longer removed from the library after a reboot.

PS3 no longer stops playing Hulu videos once the 2GB mark is reached.

Version 2.1 (April 29, 2012)

New Features

Import iTunes content automatically and stay in synch with it (DRM protected content is excluded).

Support additional Samsung TV models.

Support WTV files (the newest video format used by Windows Media Center for recordings).

Transcoding for iPad will now generate 720p videos when the system is fast enough and source video is HD.

Experimental support for Sony’s Google TV (various TV models).

Bug Fixes

Fix “always transcoding” bug with Xbox.

Fix off-screen browser audio issues with Flash player version 11.2.

Various other minor fixes.

Version 2.0 (April 13, 2012)

New Features

Major re-write of the transcoding engine such that:

it works correctly disregarding the codec pack installed and even when codec hell is prevalent on the system.

The engine can now utilize Windows Foundation codecs and demuxers and not just DirectShow (Windows 7 only).

The engine now converts only audio or only video when possible, thus requiiring lower system resources and maintaining the original quality of the source materials.

The engine chooses the most appropriate audio language (for MKV and DIVX) when multiple audio tracks exist with different languages and the most appropriate subtitle language (for MKV) when multiple subtitle languages exist.

The engine takes into account the system capabilities when determing transcoding paramters by executing a transcodng benchmark the first time the software runs after an installation.

Support WPL playlists.

Support latest firmware version of WDTV Live.

Basic version supports again embeddable YouTube videos (Pro version plays everything including vevo music videos).

User accounts are now supported for YouTube, Flickr and Picasa and multiple types of content are important per account (and kept in synch). Hulu queue is no longer supported since Hulu has eliminate the RSS feed for the queue.

Better handling of concurrent reads and writes to the media library database through the use of WAL journaling mode in sqlite.

Video thumbnails are now generated for many formats.

Disconnecting storage devices (like USB sticks and mobile hard drives) will automatically remove their media from the library (assuming it was shared).

Nightly refresh is randomized over a couple of hours to avoid hitting web content sites by many users at the same time.

Bug Fixes

Fix failures of photo transcoding due to missing ImageMagick DLLs.

Fix various tag extraction issues by moving to taglib 1.7.

Fix rare crashes related to thread safety of ffmpeg.

Various improvements and fixes related to parsing RSS/ATOM/RDF/OPML feeds.

Fix errors when manually setting the device to Xbox, this is now supported again.

Installation wizard now allows choosing a friendly computer name to use when discovered by other devices (i.e. this name will be displayed on TV when detected by a game console or other TV connected devices).

Perform server side buffering for live streams to avoid stutter on devices that cannot deal with such videos properly (like the PS3 that assumes the video on demand scenario only).

Run a CPU benchmark after installation to determine optimal transcoding settings for the system.

Menus created from RSS/ATOM feeds are cleaner (less duplicates, and no unnecessary nesting levels).

Installation wizard properly configures the system for decoding of MPEG1/2 and DV (assuming proper decoder are installed), and for downmizing of multi-channel audio to stereo so that transcoding can succeed in such cases.

Better handling of high bitrate peaks when transcoding such that playback freezes are eliminated or at the very least reduced.

Installation wizard now configures the Windows firewall on both private and public networks when dealing with Windows 7.

Move to latest version of ImageMagick which eliminates some rare failures to transcode photos. It also means that we do not need to modify the global ImageMagick registry key and hence we do not interfere with a normal ImageMagick installation.

Prevent Windows from entering sleep mode when some media is streaming.

Bug Fixes

Return “text/xml” as mime type of device description document as required by the UPnP standard.

Allow pausing playback for up to 4 hours (as opposed to the 2 minute limitation in previous version).

Server can now gracefully shut down even when something is streaming.

Fix video indexing by album and by genre.

Fix server side browse videos to continue streaming without issues even when the audio stops in the middle.

Version 1.9.2 (July 25, 2010)

DVD quality YouTube videos - add support for 480p YouTube videos (the maximum currently offered when embedding videos), fall back to 360p when 480p is unavailable and then to 240p when 360p is not available.

Version 1.9 (July 13, 2010)

On the fly transcoding for iPhone/iPad/iPod touch including transcoding of local media and web content.

Full support for the iPad.

Faster playback start of premium content video.

Do not show playback controls for Hulu.

Various bug fixes.

All editions

Remove the Ask toolbar and Babylon, in preparation for offering a TVersity toolbar for spontaneous subscription to web content (coming soon).

Add some user contributed device profiles to profiles.xml.

Transcoding of FLV with H264 is supported.

Transcoding of videos in MPEG2 transport streams is supported.

When transcoding VOB fix a bug where sometimes the wrong audio track was chosen in a multi audio track VOB (always take the first one, which is typically English).

iPhone and iPad now move to next item automatically when playing music.

iPhone and iPad new and revamped web interface with support for keyword search.

Move to ffmpeg 0.6.

Various bug fixes.

Version 1.8 (February 25, 2010)

Pro edition

Completely new off-screen browser, based on Google Chromium: runs out of process for increased stability and solves all the known issues with premium content (it used to occasionally fail to start on some systems).

Premium content site are now defined in an external file (osb.xml), advanced users can easily add their sites.

List of supported websites can now be updated without requiring a new release, so expect many new sites to be added and pushed to you from now on. (Advanced users should send us their additions since from time to time we overwrite your osb.xml automatically).

Update and expand YouTube support to include subscriptions, favorites and playlists by user (in addition to user video uploads which were previously supported). Also support adding YouTube content by search queries (replaces the “by tag” category which YouTube has obsoleted).

Version 1.7.2.1 (September 22, 2009)

Version 1.7.2 (September 12, 2009)

Version 1.7.1 (September 12, 2009)

Stability of Pro version greatly improved.

Video playback for premium content is smoother.

Version 1.7 (September 9, 2009)

Vista UAC - It is no longer required to disable UAC when using TVersity on Vista. TVertsity works well with UAC, and post installation, no UAC prompts will come up except when starting/stopping the sharing service.

Vista SSDP - It is no longer required to disable the SSDP service on Vista. This allows running other media sharing applications side by side with TVersity. Additionally, the discover-ability of TVersity on the network has been improved.

GUI - Fixed the GUI problem related to inability to connect to the sharing service (only occurred on system in which local storage was disabled for Flash player 8).

Security - Apply latest fixes to MSVC runtime with which TVersity is linked.

Installation Wizard - the installation process has been greatly simplified, there is no need to go through the installation screens of the configuration wizard and codec pack.

Version 1.6 (May 19, 2009)

Pro edition

Playing premium content no longer requires Stereo-Mix and the sound is no longer heard on the PC running TVersity.

Off-screen browser was giving up on playback too soon when the video was buffering.

SSDP discovery did not work on machines with long host names (11 or more characters).

Version 1.5 (April 20, 2009)

Pro edition

Added support for premium content (full list of supported websites is here) via an off-screen web browser coupled with live audio capture.

Support audio drift compensation to keep audio and video in synch when sound card/driver are not providing samples at the expected frequency (by default this is is disabled, can be enabled via Settings -> Transcoder.)

GUI has new section under the settings tab for entering user accounts. Users can enter credentials for some premium content sites so that off-screen browser will login to their account. This is required for certain sites to access certain content, and to have other account settings apply (e.g. By logging in, Hulu users can access R rated content, higher quality video, subtitles, resume where they left of and so on.)

Accept RSS and Atom feeds without media enclosures as long as they link to a video page that the off-screen browser can render. This expands the range of content one can subscribe to considerably. Some sites that are supported that way are Hulu, BBC, Joost, Comedy Central, Marvel, NFL, ESPN and so more.

Off screen browser can click play on behalf of users for video pages that require it.

All editions

Support for HTTP relay server to allows remote access to media library behind firewall. The server side service is not yet launched so one cannot use this feature as of right now (test accounts are available upon request.)

Move list of media sources to a separate database (admin.db), this way one can add/update/delete media sources during an ongoing library refresh, without getting errors or long delays.

WMV encoding via ffmpeg was broken and now works again. When enabled, this makes transcoding for 360 faster and less resource intensive.

Modify the Blackberry profile to issue a maximum file size of 30MB (even when the file is bigger). This seems the maximum AT&T; allows over EDGE. Also, add opera mini as a user agent for the Blackberry.

Modify DIRECTV profiles to accept only MPEG2 video and MPEG1 Layer II or III audio. This solves issues with VCD videos and with DVD with AC3/DTS sound.

Numerous minor bug fixes and fix some not so minor but very rare concurrecny issues.

Change default video resolution for transcoded media from 400x300 to 640x480, this reflects improvement in computer processing power over the last few years. If your computer is not fast enough (at least core 2 duo 1.6 Ghz) this resolution will need to be decreased.

Bug Fixes

Fix display of high resolution photos on the PS3.

Handle correctly standard genres (as per ID3v1) in AAC files.

Version 1.0.0.8 RC5 (November 27, 2008)

New Features

Media source dialog box now has a new checkbox (when “Advanced” is enabled) that allows turning on/off featuring of media in top level menus.

TVersity, by default, no longer modifies metadata (title, artist, album, etc.) for readability. As before it is a configurable setting.

User messages were completely rewritten for better clarity and consistency of terminology

Add a user message for new device detection.

On Windows Mobile devices, the web interface once again allows playing all items on the page as a WMP playlist.

Bug Fixes

Re-transcoding after download completed was occasionally failing - this is now fixed.

An error message at the end of playback of youtube videos was displayed by some devices (like the DIRECTV set-top-boxes) - the number of cases in which this happens was reduced drastically.

Playback of certain Internet media was prematurely terminated on some devices - this is now fixed.

Fix crash on RSS feeds that have no file name in the URL.

Transcode status was reported incorrectly when serving media from a cached version of a previously transcoded content - this is now fixed.

UPnP:Browse was returning wrong number of children in some cases - this is now fixed (special thanks to the folks at LINN for reporting it).

Fix “Not Authorized” issue with Denon 3808 receiver (uses Philips SLA profile) that used to happen when turning the unit on and attempting to use it with TVersity after using it successfully the previous time it was on.

Many additional minor bug fixes.

Version 1.0.0.6 RC4 (October 22, 2008)

Support for PS3 firmware 2.5.

YouTube URLs that expire are now automatically re-acquired, eliminating the need to do a refresh of the media source.

Version 1.0.0.4 RC3 (September 21, 2008)

Feature some Internet content during installation to raise awareness for Internet video support in TVersity. This content, if subscribed to, will be available at the root menu of devices.

Navigation by Folders and by Podcasts is now available at the root menu of devices that have such a menu. These new menu choices combine audio, photo and video items, all in the same place.

The file extensions mts and m2ts (used for AVCHD videos by HD camcorders) are now recognized and can be streamed to PS3.

Public media sources are now aggregated in a global repository and will soon be used to offer new content search and discovery features.

Added a user contributed profile for the DSM 750.

Bug Fixes

Music menus on Xbox 360 were not working.

Some DVD videos were transcoded even when it was not required.

Some iPhone videos were transcoded even when it was not required.

A rare sqlite crash was solved by upgrading to the latest release.

A rare pthreads crash was solved by upgrading to the latest release.

Version 1.0.0.3 RC2 (July 22, 2008)

New Features

Album art support is now available and is compatible with the Sony PS3 as well as with the HTML interface (PSP, iPhone, Blackberry, etc.) and flash interface (Wii). Album art relies on JPEG files conforming to certain naming conventions that are present in the same folder as music tracks. These files can be created by either Windows Media Player or WinAmp and TVersity will pick them up, or users can add them manually.

Individual YouTube videos can now be added by pointing the browser to a specific video on YouTube and dragging and dropping the address bar icon to TVersity (or copying and pasting the URL).

Bug Fixes

MShare now refreshes as fast as it was in 0.9.11.4.

No files are periodically added to the Temporary Internet Files folder while the GUI is running (browser caching was turned off).

Fix crashes when adding/refreshing some FLAC and some MP3 files.

Flash interface is now more reliable when switching from one live stream to another and then going back to first one.

TVersity service was failing to start on machines that had a non ASCII character in their hostname.

Version 1.0 RC1 (June 29, 2008)

User Interface

The GUI is completely redesigned and is more usable and user friendly than ever.

A new status tab is now available showing any background operation performed by the server as well as a sever message log.

The library tab now contains both the media sources and a preview of how these sources are organized by the server into a media library.

Adding and modifying content from YouTube, Flickr, and Google Video is now easier than ever, thanks to built in content wizards. The wizards recognize these domains and allow one to enter a user name, tags, search queries instead of being required to copy/paste (or drag and drop) a full URL.

A content guide is now available to help users get started with Internet content and unleash the full potential of their connected home experience.

A new configuration wizard has been created to automate some common system configuration tasks that users needed to do manually prior to this release.

Many additional major and minor usability fixes.

Connected Devices

Add support for Blackberry phones over WiFi (OS4.2 or higher is required for downloading media to the phone, OS4.3 or higher required for streaming).

H.264 was mistakenly always transcoded for PSP and iPhone, this is no longer the case.

Since we can now transcode FLV and MP4 while downloading them, the default configuration for RSS feeds is changed such that only the one newest item in the feed is downloaded during a subscription/refresh. This in contrast to downloading the two newest items in previous releases.

WAV support is now assumed for all DIRECTV set-top-box models, this is in contrast to PCM only. Thanks to that all radio stations and other Internet audio can be played.

An Apple touch icon is now available for the iPhone / iPod touch interface.

Auto detect iPod touch.

Advanced users may want to know that devices profiles (in profiles.xml) can now inherit from one another, this allows reuse of profile definitions for similar devices.

Transcoding

MP4, FLV and many other formats can now be transcoded while downloaded, this is in contrast to previous version where these formats needed to be pre-downloaded.

Can now stream AAC/AACP radio stations (over HTTP) and if necessary transcode while streaming.

Media Library

Users are no longer pre-subscribed to YouTube and G4 instead they can add the content they want via the new Guide. This way there will be no download of media without an explicit subscription.

YouTube RSS feeds include media URLs that expire after a few hours. Refreshing the YouTube feeds now updates these URLs.

Bug Fixes and more

GUI was not connecting on machines where localhost was not resolved to 127.0.0.1.

The AlbumArtist tag is now used whenever indexing by artist and then by album. The Artist tag is still used whenever indexing by artist and then by something other than album. This is all configurable via config.xml.

Installation wizard was claiming that TVersity.exe was running even though it was not, this is now fixed.

Different media enclosed in RSS feeds will no longer map to the same media file in the cache (and hence overwrite each other) even when the URL is very long.

Nested ASX is now handled correctly, this fixes issues with media added from viewmy.tv.

Use password entered in the settings tab no longer gets corrupted after saving it.

GENA subscriptions did not work in certain cases, this is now fixed.

Connection speed menu under Settings tab -> Transcoder, now has an option for public Internet. This is designed for accessing TVersity on the go and it takes into account the upstream Internet connection speed.

Many more minor and not so minor bug fixes.

Version 0.9.11.4 (December 30, 2007)

Transcoding configuration can now be done on the file/folder/url level, in which case it wil supersede the system wide settings.

It is now possible to set the menus to be organized by folders only, this is in additon to the default menu organization and the custom one.

Turn off transcoding of AVI/DIVX (version 4 or higher) for the Sony PS3 (Divx3 is still transcoded) since firmware 2.1 can play them natively.

AVI/Divx that do not play natively can still be manually configured to be transcoded. This for examples solves the PS3 problem with Divx files larger than 2 Gb.

Do not register a Windows shell context menu command for files (since it gets invoked when double clicking on file types that have no other handlers). The context menu command for folders is still kept since it has no undesirable side effects.

Version 0.9.11.3 (December 4, 2007)

Support for Xbox 360 2007 Fall update, Divx/Xvid can play natively.

Support fast-forward, rewind and skipping with Xbox 360 while transcoding, within the portion of the media that was already transcoded.

Include all the patches for the Sony PS3 firmware verison 2, including support for WMA lossless and FLAC.

Revert HR20 profile to use PCM audio since many users do not have a firmware with WAV support, and add two new profiles for HR20 with WAV support and for HR20 with MP3 support to be set manually by users that have an adequate firmware.

Support fast forward and rewind within transcoded media with PS3 firmware 2.

Add experimental support for Windows Mobile - downloading and streaming audio is now supported with Windows Mobile 5.0 or higher, only MSIE and WMP are required.

Version 0.9.11.2 (November 11, 2007)

Security

Remote access to the media library is now by default disabled.

Authentication can be turned on and off for each server directory (both virtual and physical) via config.xml. By default remote access to all directories requires authentication when enabled and is rejected otherwise..

When enabling remote access to the library via the GUI, a user name and password must be set or else authentication will fail when attempting to access the media library from outside the LAN.

The web based user interface was moved from the root directory to the /admin directory and the root directory is now equivalent to the /lib directory.

Note that authentication does not work in conjunction with the Sony PSP RSS reader and must be turned off (by editing config.xml) if remote streaming to this device is desirable.

Media Library

Customizable menu hierarchy

Multiple menu hierarchies can be created and co-exist. In the free version of TVersity this is limited to one custom hierarchy in addition to the default hierarchy.

Each new media source (file, folder, URLs, RSS feeds, etc.) can have a custom menu location.

Users can switch between the default TVersity menus and their custom menus; This will immediately affect all devices, with the exception of devices that impose a rigid hierarchy (like the Xbox 360) or devices that require Audio/Photo/Video to be at the root of the hierarchy (like the DSM 320).

Users can customize the indexing of the default and the custom hierarchy, adding or removing indexes as they see fit. This is done by editing config.xml and not via the GUI.

File and folders can be tagged now just like URLs and RSS feeds. With folders their entire content will be accessible via the tag (including playlists).

Devices

Fix premature playback termination with firmware 2.0 of the Sony PS3.

Any Internet audio can now be played on the DirecTV HR20 and no special configuration changes are needed.

The ActiveTV profile was removed since ActiveTV does not represent any one type of device, furthermore since ActiveTV software has built in support for transcoding, TVersity never transcodes for ActiveTV devices.

iPhone playback page is now more consistent in its look and feel with the rest of the UI.

iPhone UI has an about button.

Nokia N800 RSS reader is now correctly identified.

Bug fixes and more

Sample content distributed with TVersity was reduced to YouTube feeds and G4TV podcasts, this will minimize the refresh time and bandwidth consumption upon installation.

Fix a rare crash in media library refresh.

The content directory dc:title property is now populated with a valid value as per the UPnP A/V standard.

Two consecutive dot characters in tags and menu entries are treated as an escaped dot character.

Fix the markup in RSS feeds generated by TVersity.

Move to SQLite 3.5.1.

Version 0.9.10.8 (October 8, 2007)

Support for new devices and platforms

Podcasts and featured radio stations now work with the DirecTV HR20, and this device is now automatically detected.

Windows Media Center is now supported (requires Media Center on the PC running TVersity). To see this new feature check the new start menu option at Start -> Program -> TVersity Media Server -> TVersity tools -> TVersity for Windows Media Center.

Active-TV is supported (requires Active-TV software on the PC running TVersity). To see this new feature check the new start menu option at Start -> Program -> TVersity Media Server -> TVersity tools -> TVersity for activeTV.

Bug fixes and minor enhancements

Apple iPhone CSS fix for firmware 1.1.1.

Nested RSS feeds are now correctly refreshed.

AAC are now played natively on Sony PS3 and are no longer transcoded.

Installation to a different location than before, now works.

The TVersity codec pack is now included with the TVersity installer.

Additional sample video, photos, and audio feeds (including YouTube) are included with the TVersity installer.

Recognize the file extensions SHN (Shorten) and AT3 (Atrac3), these can be transcoded only if the relevant DirectShow filters are installed.

New icons are included, courtesy of Dylan Wreggelsworth.

Version 0.9.10.7 (July 19, 2007)

Apple iPhone Support

Point Safari on the iPhone to http://xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx:41952/iphone to see this in action. When using an EDGE connection use http://xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx:41952/iphone/edge. In both cases xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx is the IP address of the machine running TVersity.

You can access your home media collection in the home and on the go however in each of these cases a different IP address is needed and you may need to establish a port forwarding in order to access it on the go.

When video transcoding is needed the iPhone cannot start playback until the entire conversion is completed, this is a restriction of the MP4/MOV/3GPP containers when streamed over HTTP (and since the iPhone does not support RTSP/RTP there is no way around it at the moment).

Bug fixes and more

Transcoding of audio formats (such as FLAC and OGG) to PCM (for Xbox 360 and DirectTV HR20) was broken in one of the previous release and is now fixed.

The iPod/iTunes profile now creates MP4 videos that are compatible with the iPod. This is unlike the MPEG1/2 which was previously used and with which iTunes needed to do another conversion before copying it to the iPod.

Fix rare crashes occurring when stopping the sharing service while some files are being downloaded in the background.

Fix a rare hanging during media library construction when reading AVI files with certain pecularities in their header.

The transcoder can now gracefully recover from an occasional corrupted time stamp when decoding media and produce a valid transcoding result.

Fixed problem with new version notification where it was repeatedly displayed in some rare cases.

The shell menu extension for sharing files and folders no longer fails for files and folders that have the & or = characters in their name.

Version 0.9.10.5 (June 26, 2007)

User Interface

One click “Add to TVersity” from third party websites via a new button; Partner websites can use this new button with media URLs and RSS / OPML / ATOM / RDF feeds to allow their users to add content to TVersity in one click. We will soon announce the first batch of content sites that will add this button. Here is an example button that adds a G4TV RSS feed:

One click sharing via TVersity from Windows explorer; Right click on any file or folder and you will now find a “Share via TVersity” option.

Automatic Updates; The UI now issues an alert message when a new version is available and provides a direct link for downloading it.

Reading of AVI tags can now be turned on/off.

There is a new variable allowing one to define the maximum number of items per RSS feed TVersity should process (the rest are ignored). This is important with feeds that keep their entire history, which in some cases can be thousands of items.

Several different WMV versions are now supported when encoding video, all of which can be selected from the GUI. The versions are: MSMPEG4v3, WMV7, WMV8, and WMV9.

There is an experimental support for encoding to WMV via ffmpeg instead of via Directshow.

Content Guides and Media Library

New radio directory by radiotime.com for music and talk radio (channels and shows) organized by genre

TVersity now comes with the G4TV feeds added as a sample video feed.

TVersity now supports OPML, this is one more format like RSS / ATOM / RDF (which were already supported) for importing metadata from third party websites.

Accept files with m2t extension (MPEG2 transport stream).

PS3 support

MPEG2 produced by TVersity now works on the PS3, which gives the user an option between MPEG1 and MPEG2 (in the past only MPEG1 produced by TVersity worked on the PS3).

The copy to PS3 hard drive feature now works when browsing via TVersity.

Bug fixes and more

Fix issues with playlists that have items with relative path and add support for absolute pathnames in playlists that have a UNC path (or are located on a network drive).

The sharing service no longer exits when the user loggs off.

Conversion of media for playback on some target device, via the flash interface now works again (was broken in the previous relaese but worked in earlier ones).

Better handling of icecast URLs.

Metacafe RSS feeds and URLs now work again.

Version 0.9.10.3 (May 30, 2007)

Support the Sony PS3 firmware 1.8 - from firmware 1.8 there is no need to use the Adobe Flash interface for the PS3 (it is still the only way to stream media to the Nintendo Wii). You can now access your entire audio, photo and video collection from the PS3 dashboard, including Internet Radio/TV, RSS feeds and more. The changes from the previously released patch are:

Internet radio now works on the PS3. First playback attempt is likely to fail with an “Access to the media server has been denied” message (or “unsupported data” message), this is because the PS3 does not wait long enough for the data to be fetched over the Internet. After this failure, wait a few seconds and try playing this same station again. Assuming a connection to that station was possible, there won’t be an error message, however the actual playback may take up to two minutes and more to start since the PS3 requires about 1 MB of data before it initiates playback.

Internet video and transcoded content starts playing faster than it used to (saving about 5 seconds).

Library refresh is now reflected on the PS3 and on any other device that checks the media server for updates (leaving a folder that has updates and then going back to it is required in order to see the changes).

When moving from one Internet video to another, previously the older video was not always terminated, this is now fixed.

Issues with green bars or distorted colors when playing via PS3 were resolved.

The TVersity icon is now shown by the Ps3.

Support the Xbox 360 spring update - this includes hierarchical video browsing and native playback of MPEG4 (including H.264 and AAC). Changes from the previously released patch are:

TVersity can now produce WMV7 or WMV8 or WMV9 or MSMPEG4V3 once can switch between them by seting the wmProfile variable in config.xml to one of wmv7, wmv8, wmv9, mp43.

TVersity can now encode to WMV in two methods, the first is via directshow (which always existed and still is the default) and the second is via ffmpeg. While for now only wmv8 can be produced via ffmpeg, it is slightly faster than directshow and hence it may prove beneficial in certain cases.

Conversion to WMV of MJPEG with mono audio no longer fails.

Improved Adobe flash library interface (for Nintendo Wii or any web browser with support for Flash 7 or higher)

Solve the occasional interface locks during browsing.

Add a download button that is more accessible and does not require any menu selection, but rather considers the currently selected profile.

More reliably termintate previously played Internet streamed when moving to new ones.

Stop playing current media when the GUI is minimized to the tray icon.

Other fixes and improvements

Reading tags from Avi files is now turned off by default. It can be turned on by setting the readAVITags variable in config.xml.

The TVersity service is now starting more reliably during a reboot, waiting, if necessary, for the networking to finish initializing, instead of quitting if it is not already initialized when Tversity is started.

Correctly detect some cases where transcoding is not needed, and were mistakenly transcoded in the past.

Do not block every URL with two consecutive dot characters, but rather check if the canonical path is shared or not and based on this determine if to allow ot deny access to it. This solves some playlist related playback issues.

The device selection menu in the settings tab of the GUI, has now a scrollbar.

Fix image browsing for the DirectTV HR20.

Faster response time when searching the media library.

Fixed some crashes during library refresh.

Version 0.9.10.2 (May 1, 2007)

Better support for the Nintendo Wii - the Adobe Flash interface for the Wii and PS3 is now fully operational via cursor motion/clicks and it no longer requires the use of arrow keys. This change was made to better support the Nintendo Wii. The main changes are:

There is a new “up one level” button that is always visible and is more accessible than the one in the toolbar.

The scroll bars are larger and allow page scrolling in addition to single item scrolling.

Playback controls are displayed once the cursor is moved to the bottom of the screen.

Better support for the DirectTV HR20 - images at resolutions higher than 1920x1080 are now downsampled since this device cannot handle very high resolutions.

Version 0.9.10.1 (April 19, 2007)

Support for New Devices

The Adobe flash interface for the media library has been extended and is now a full blown media center front end that can be used via many devices including the PS3 and the Wii (Wii is still experimental and was only tested on Desktop Opera). It can also be used on remote computers of any OS that has Adobe flash version 7 or higher. When using TVersity in this mode, it will transcode video on the fly to FLV with H.263 (compatible with Adobe flash 7) and therefore video streaming is possible. You can try this new functionality by pointing a web browser to http://xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx:41952/flashlib where xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx is the IP address of the computer running TVersity. PS3 users please note that streaming video to the flash player can only be done when the PS3 is set to 480p/i. There is simply not enough horsepower on the PS3 to play Flash video when the display is set to 720p or 1080i/p.

TVersity can now transcode to Divx - this is used in conjunction with the Nokia N800, which is now fully supported, both via the Nokia Media Streamer application (UPnP based) and via the web browser. It is recommended to use the Media Streamer and not the UPnP browser that is built into the media player due to certain incompatibilities that need to be resolved together with Nokia.

TVersity can now transcode to MPEG4 - this is used in conjunction with the Sony PSP. MPEG4 as a format cannot be encoded and streamed at the same time over HTTP (streaming live content via MPEG4 requires RTSP) and therefore it is only possible to download videos to the memory stick. Clicking on some video in the PSP browser will start a conversion (if needed) however due to the limitation mentioned above the actual download will start only after the conversion is done. For large files the PSP will display an error message after a while thinking that the download cannot be started. Simply try again and assuming the conversion is done the download will work and the resulting video should play on the PSP.

User contributed device profiles were added for the DSM 510, Netgear EVA700, Telegent TG100, and Directv HR20. These devices are not officially supportred but users report that they are working well.

The profiles for the DSM 520 and Philips Streamiums have been extended to create high resolution videos when applicable (i.e. the source content is high resolution). This is in contrast to older versions where the videos for these devices were always in VCD quality.

The Pinnacle Showcenter is now automatically detected.

Transcoding

The following transcode targets for videos are now accepted in profiles.xml (all of which exacpt the last two are new):

video/x-msvideo - Divx + MP3 in AVI container

video/divx16 - Same as above but also make sure that resolution is multiple of 16 (needed by Nokia N800)

video/mp4v-es - MPEG4 + AAC in MPEG4 container (this format does not allow on the fly conversion and delivery to the target device, meaning that only after the conversion is done the delivery can start)

video/x-flv - H.263 + MP3 in FLV container

video/dvd - MPEG2 Video and MPEG Layer II audio conforming to the DVD format (720x480 with bitrates and other properties as per the DVD standard)

video/vcd - MPEG1 video and MPEG Layer II audio conforming to the VCD format (352x288 with bitrates and other properties as per the VCD standard)

video/vardvd - source videos up to 352x288 will be treated same as video/vcd, source video up to 720x480 will be treated same as video/dvd and higher videos (this is now high definition) will be MPEG1 HD (assuming the target device can handle HD content)

For security reasons, TVersity now refuses to serve any URL corresponding to a file path that has two consecutive dot characters. This is to insure that access to non shared files is not possible.

The stuttering at the end of videos (or premature termination) on the Xbox 360 was resolved.

Some crashes during media library refresh were fixed.

Certain incorrect HTTP behavior with ranges and with chunked encoding was fixed.

Known Issues

On the PS3 after playing a video for a while, switching to another video may produce the not enought memory error. This can be overcome by refreshing the browser page and then loading the new video.

Navigating the flash interface of the media library and switching between videos quickly can lead to the interface hanging. This can be overcome by refreshing the web page (and hence reloading the flash interface).

Version 0.9.9.2 (December 25, 2006)

RSS Feeds

The FLV media inside SWF URLs from YouTube RSS feeds is now automatically detected. This means that adding a YouTube RSS feed to TVersity will now work as expected, with all the enclosed media listed and ready to play.

When scanning the header of media files enclosed in RSS feeds, the user agent is now “TVersity Mediabot”. The “TVersity Media Server” user agent is still used when doing a full download (either due to a new subscription or playback of an item that was not previously downloaded).

Add support for RSS feeds that are using encodings other than UTF8 or Latin1.

Transcoding

Add support for transcoding audio to PCM and use this with the Xbox 360 instead of MP3. This way media encoded in lossless formats will have no quality degradation when streamed to the 360.

Adjust the video resolution when transcoding to WMV to insure that the Xbox 360 can upscale it to the resolution of the TV using integer multiplication. This eliminates display artifacts that used to occur when the video resolution was not conforming to this criterion.

Take into account the pixel aspect ratio of videos (that is for videos with non square pixels) when transcoding. This means that 16:9 and 4:3 DVDs will look as they are supposed to when transcoded.

The “Disable decoding clock” on the transcoder section of the settings tab is now meaningful when transcoding to WMV. This means that Xbox 360 users that wish to avoid 100% CPU usage when the video does not require it, can turn this flag off.

Media Librray

Added a new index for songs: “Release Year / Artist / Album”

List under the “Song” folder of the Xbox 360 all audio URLs as well as all local audio files, this way it is no longer necessary to place URLs inside playlists to see them on the 360 menus.

Add support for long title strings, which are essentially titles that include the name of their parents. This is to allow users of the Xbox 360 to navigate their long list of videos. This feature is turned off by default (since devices other than the Xbox 360 do not need it). When turning it on (from the settings tab in the GUI) one needs to reconstruct the media library for this to take effect.

Windows Vista compatibility

All executables now have manifests to request admin privileges on Vista (this should allow them to run even with UAC enabled as long as the user grants them the permission to run as admins).

The Sharing service is installed on Vista without the “Allow interaction with desktop” feature since Vista does not support this (on XP/2K we keep using this feature as before since it allows codec icons to appear in the tray when they are used during transcoding).

Bug fixes and more

Fix issues related to premature termination when transcoding to WMV (this should solve the famous termination problem with the Xbox 360).

Add support for short URLs, this will allow devices that trim long URLs (like the Xbox 360 and the Sony PSP) to accept content from TVersity disregarding the length of the URL of that content.

Add support for friendly file names in short URLs, so that devices that download content to their local storage (like the Sony PSP) will give a friendly name to content downloaded from TVersity.

Fix a crash that occurs when scanning a corrupt MP3 file.

The installer no longer overrides user definitions to the TVersity sharing service (that is it is no longer necessary to reconfigure a log-on account after each installation).

Fixed the CNN Radio and Ministry of sound TV URLs in the TVersity Guides.

Icons of audio and video RSS feeds are now properly displayed in the web interface.

Eliminate “insane” duration values displayed for some videos. Videos from which we cannot retrieve the duration, will now not have a value at all.

Fix a GUI bug related to using the keyboard in the sharing tab and having the keystrokes propagate to the library tab.

The right click menu can now be used on items in the sharing tab and it works as expected (previously it sopped working once the tray icon menu was invoked - a seemingly unrelated action had some, unaccounted for, side effects).

Version 0.9.9.1 (November 26, 2006)

On the fly transcoding to WMV for the Xbox 360

Xbox 360 users can now play their entire media library with no need for MCE.

Users of other devices that can play WMV can use this target format as an alternative to MPEG. While this will require faster machines to achieve the same quality, it allow for a higher quality per bitrate meaning that a slower home network can be used. This is important mainly for HD content streamed over wireless connections.

Upconversion of videos to WMV HD can be done (on a fast machine) by tweaking the minVideoInfo in config.xml.

It is highly recommended to upgrade to Windows Media Player 11 as it includes more recent and more stable encoders, this is especially important if you experience crashes in qasf.dll.

Improved GUI

The GUI is now an exe file (as opposed to the HTML Application (HTA) it used to be). This should solve the DEP errors on Vista Beta 2.

The GUI is now functional even when the sharing is stopped and the sharing can be both started and stopped from the GUI (only starting and restarting was supported in the past).

A tray icon has been added with a tray icon menu for starting and stopping the sharing service .

Drag and drop is now supported for sharing media. Simply drag files/folders to the GUI and even XML feed URLs and they will be added to the librray.

Multi select is now supported in the list of shared items and the play, refresh and delete operations can now be invoked on multiple items in one operation.

Scroll wheel support was added throughout the GUI.

Right click menu was added for items in the sharing tab.

When the server is down the connection error dialog box is no longer displayed and instead a connection error icon is displayed at the top right corner of the window.

The sharing tab now allows files/folders to be opened (as opposed to the past behavior where this was enabled only for URLs).

The settings tab can now open the cache area folder.

A preview of our new media library graphical user interface is included, this is provided in addition to the web based interface. This interface will come in two versions the first is AJAX and the second is Macormedia Flash based (only this version is currently being provided). This new interface will be the basis for our upcoming support for the Sony PS3 and will be used for any web browser enabled device that can handle AJAX or Macromedia flash to provide a better user experience than the simpler web based interface (which will remain the interface of choice for limited resource devices such as mobile phones, the Sony PSP, etc.). Future releases will add support for playback inside this new interface as opposed to the current behavior where an external player is invoked.

Windows can now discover TVersity and display it in “My Network Places”, if the UPnP discovery components are installed.

The server accepts now the mime type video/flv (this is in addition to video/x-flv that was already there). This solves issues with YouTube flv videos that the server refused to add due to an unknown mime type.

Bug Fixes

Bad Internet URLs no longer cause the server to hang for a long period of time (during which no other media could be played).

UPnP connections from different networks or different subnets are now accepted when the server is configured to accept remote connections. This is as opposed to the past behavior where this configuration only affected the web based interface.

The XML results returned by the server are now guaranteed to place the item/container title first as required by the UPnP standard.

Some issues related to playing flash video files (FLV) that were downloaded by the server automaticaly were fixed.

Temporary files that were mistakenly placed in the wrong folder are now stored in the Windows temporary folder.

Version 0.9.8.2a (September 17, 2006)

Modify the installer to fix some Image Magick related registry keys that are necessary for image manipulation to work.

Version 0.9.8.1 (September 10, 2006)

The AlbumArtist tag is now supported for ID3v2 and WMA and the Artist/Album and Genre/Artist/Album indices now rely on this tag (as opposed to the Artist tag).

Browsed and searched media library content can now be opened as playlist in Windows Media Player, Quicktime and Real Player. This makes the web based interface for browsing one’s media library remotely much more useful and user friendly.

Modify display of photos such that the title is displayed under the photo.

Non english characters are now displayed correctly in MSIE and some alignment issues with them are now also fixed.

Ultravox URLs (used mainly by Radio@AOL) are now accepted however no transcoding is applied to them. This means that they will play only if your device has native support for them.

TVersity now accepts PLS and M3U files even if they include some non standard lines and simply ignores those lines.

Bug fixes and more

Fix issues with the Nokia 770 UPnP control point not being able to discover TVersity.

TVersity’s GUI and the MShare command line tools, now accept files and folders with non english characters.

Multiple instances of TVersity can now coexist on the same network without interfering with one another.

Version 0.9.7.2 (August 10, 2006)

Media Library - Media library creation is now 2.5 times faster than before, meaning that the scanning of media files that used to take 10 minutes will now take about 4 minutes. This improvement is not relevant for media URLs or RSS feeds since for them the delay is mainly related to the time it takes to analyze the format of the media over the Internet.

Bug fixes and more

The problem with playlist files missing from the media library has been resolved, and they now appear as they did prior to 0.9.7.1.

The problem with the latest firmware of the Netgear MP101 not connecting to version 0.9.7.1 has been resolved.

Smart playlists items now show ID3 tags.

Problems with the Xbox 360 possibly not connecting to TVersity when the GUI settings is changed from auto-detect to the Xbox 360 profile, have been resolved.

Memory leaks related to backgrorund downloading of RSS items have been fixed by upgrading to the latest cURL version.

Version 0.9.7.1 (July 30, 2006)

Support for the Xbox 360

TVersity can now serve audio and photos to the Xbox 360. Video is not supported since the Xbox 360 does not accept video via UPnP.

Transcoding of audio and photo formats not natively supported by the Xbox 360 is fully functional, meaning that Xbox 360 owners can now play Ogg Vorbis, FLAC and other formats.

Internet audio and image feeds are also supported. Since the Xbox 360 does not provide room in its menus for Internet feeds, TVersity is listing them in the playlists section.

Audio URLs (such as Internet radio stations) are supported as well, however will need to be placed in a playlist file in order to be accessible from the Xbox 360 menus.

Support for Search and for Smart Playlists

Searching the media library is now supported via UPnP devices, via the web interface, and via mobile devices such as the Sony PSP and the Nokia 770.

Search results can be saved as a playlist by adding their RSS feed back to TVersity.

Advanced search queries that make use of properties like genre, artist, album, title, and other, are also supported. An example of such an advanced query is:

The DSM 520 with firmware 1.02 is now automatically identified, older firmware versions are still identified as the DSM 320.

The latest firmware of the Omnifi DMS1 (v2.1) is now supported.

Bug fixes and minor changes

The computer name is now added to the friendly name TVersity provides to UPnP devices, making it easier to identify cases where several instances of TVersity are running simultaneously.

Nested RSS feeds are not added anymore to the Internet feeds container, making the menus cleaner and non cluttered.

Image URLs will now show icons, a feature that previously worked only for local files and URLs inside Internet feeds.

Version 0.9.6.2 (June 27, 2006)

Sharing media with others via RSS / Podcast publishing

RSS feeds published by TVersity can now be emailed by a click of a button to designated recipients, making it easier than ever to share a portion of the media library and keep it in synch with others.

RSS feeds published by TVersity can now be managed via Firefox live bookmarks or via Thunderbird.

RSS feeds published by TVersity will now show a readable page when opened in a web browser. In firefox (but not in MSIE) they will also allow navigation to subitems.

Device auto detection

The Philips SLA 5500 is now automatically identified after playing some track. Since this unit does not identify itself before that stage, one needs to restart it after playing some item, in order to have TVersity properly detect it and correctly transcode content for it.

Devices that are still not automatically detected by TVersity can be manually bound to a specific profile by adding their IP address as one of the values in < devicesIP value”ip1|ip2|ip3…” / > under the correct profile in profiles.xml.

Media library browsing in a web browser

When navigating the library tab inside the flash GUI one can no longer end up in a web page from which it is impossible to return.

Thumbnails are now shown for photos instead of displaying a list of photo names.

Icons and thumbnails

Icon generation is now 30% faster.

Internet feed items will now show icons / thumbnails, a feature that previously worked only for local files.

Bug fixes

Added a UTF8 header to our web based media library browsing interface, this insures a correct parsing by web browsers and fixes the issue with foreign characters not being displayed correctly in previous releases.

The Nokia 770 profile was fixed such that download of videos while transcoding them, now produces videos that play smoothly.

Version 0.9.6.1b (June 11, 2006)

Add some DLLs needed by ImageMagick, that were still missing.

Version 0.9.6.1a (June 10, 2006)

Fix image viewing issues by modifying the installer to create the necessary environment for a correct ImageMagick operation.

Version 0.9.6.1 (June 9, 2006)

Support for mobile devices, the Sony PSP and iTunes / iPod

TVersity now supports two new families of devices:

Devices that have a web browser with integrated media streaming or downloading capabilities. This includes mobile phones, mobile game consoles (like the Sony PSP), Internet tablets (like the Nokia 770), PDAs, laptops and other networked devices.

Devices that have an RSS reader with integrated media streaming or downloading capabilities. This includes the RSS reader on the Sony PSP and Apple’s iTunes/iPod.

Special integration was done with the Sony PSP, allowing one to access her entire music and photo collection and stream it (via the PSP RSS reader) or download it (via the PSP web browser). Support for Radio stations streaming to the PSP was added as well despite the fact that the PSP could not natively do streaming of live content.

PDAs, cell phones and other networked devices that have a web browser and can do multimedia streaming or downloading are supported via a general profile for mobile devices. As time goes by, individual profiles may be created for some of those devices in order to allow the server to make more accurate transcoding decisions.

The web based interface for browsing the media library can be accessed from any web browser either from the TVersity GUI or directly at http://localhost:41952/lib.

The Omnifi DMS1 (firmware 2.0xxx only, support for firmware 2.1xxx may be added later on)

Automatic detection of device make and model

TVersity is now set by default to automatically detect the devices it is serving. This makes it possible to use simulatenously devices with different make and model and have the server treat each one of them as if their specific profile was selected. The devices that can be automatically detected are:

Thanks to this feature it is no longer required to select a device make and model during installation.

There are some devices that cannot be automatically detected since they do not provide the server with identifiable information and for those it is still necessary to specify a profile explicitly. These devices are:

The Netgear MP101

The Philips SLA5500

The SMC EZStream

There are some devices that cannot be automatically detected since we do not have them in our labs and so we could not test them. For those devices we will need the help of the community to find out the information needed to identify them. Until that time these devices also require a specific profile to be selected in the TVersity GUI. These devices are:

DLink DSM 520

The Pinnacle Showcenter 200

The Terratec Noxon

Image resizing and format conversion

TVersity is now resizing images automatically to fit the device capabilities. This allows viewing of hi-res photos on devices that could not render them natively due to their size.

It is now also possible to control the size to which photos are resized from the GUI via the configurable maximum image resolution values under the transcoder settings tab.

The server can also convert images from one format to another, thus making them viewable on devices that cannot render them in their original format.

Support for image thumbnails on the DLink DSM 320⁄520 was added as well. Please note that these thumbnails are created upon first browsing and then cached and therefore subsequent browsing of the same thumbnail page will be much faster than the first time a certain page is reached.

Accessing the TVersity server remotely

It is now possible to access the TVersity server remotely from any web browser or from a mobile device (like the Sony PSP), as long as the port on which the server is listening is open for incoming traffic (it is also recommended in such a case to use some dynamic DNS service so that the address of the server will not change each time your ISP assigns a new address to your router/firewall). The server is accessible by entering into a remote web browser the URL http://host:41952/lib with the actual IP address or dynamic DNS domain name used instead of the host.

For security reasons one may disable this feature from the settings tab in the TVersity GUI. Security conscious users should establish a VPN and enable access to the server only inside the VPN. Users that cannot establish a VPN should use software solutions that automatically do that for them like hamachi.

Synchronizing content with remote podcast managers

The server can now publish portions of the media library as RSS feeds. These RSS feeds can be subscribed to from any Podcast manager including iTunes, iPodder/Juice or a remote installation of TVersity.

When a published portion of the media library (e.g. some folder) is updated at the source (e.g. new files are added to it), the updates will be detected at the destination (in the next scheduled refresh) and be reflected there as well. This makes it easy for friends and family to share portions of their media library, automatically receive new media files from one another and then access them on their device of choice.

Bug fixes

Explicit use of Haali Media splitter is now restricted to MOV / MP4 over HTTP, local MOV / MP4 are no longer triggering TVersity to try and use this filter over others. This should eliminate some of the problems this filter may cause when it encounters a file it cannot handle.

Some podcasts that were mistakenly considered empty by TVersity despite the fact that they were not, are now handled correctly.

The full refresh after install no longer takes an unusually long time.

Restore compatibility with some devices that used to work like the Snazio and the Roku Photobridge.

Version 0.9.5.3 (May 5, 2006)

Bug fixes

Audio RTSP URLs are no longer mistakenly considered to be video URLs.

The transcoder is now more selective in the directshow filters used for decoding and therefore the existence of non TVersity compatible filters in the system is less likely to interfere.

Long media URLs with same prefix are no longer confused to be the same media due to URL trimming.

The subfeeds of the TVersity video and audio feeds are now sorted properly.

Invoking a search from the media hub no longer crashes ther server.

An image file with creation time of zero no longer crashes the server.

Version 0.9.5.2 (May 1, 2006)

Eliminate delay at the end of transcoding lossless audio formats such as WMA lossless, FLAC, etc.

Eliminate yet more errors occuring when stopping the server while it is downloading some media fom the Net.

Fix some rare issues related to transcoding audio that could lead to a failure.

Version 0.9.5.1 (April 30, 2006)

GUI

Improved flash load times (cut delay by more than 50%).

Add a download status icon when the refresh of some media source is done while the downloading is still in progress.

Transcoding - TVersity now makes use of ffdshow (assuming it’s installed) whenever possible disregarding the priority assigned to it in directshow. This will hopefully eliminate most of the failures to transcode when other non TVersity compatible codecs (such as Nero, Cyberlink, Intervideo, Elecard, and more) are present.

Modified capitalization to affect only letters appearing after white space.

Aspect ratio distortions in some transcoding scenarios were eliminated.

Fixed errors when stopping the server while it is both transcoding and downloading.

Added a profile for the DLink DSM 520

ID3 tags are now extracted from WavPack media files.

Version 0.9.5.0 (April 23, 2006)

Internet Media

Support for RSS (0.9.1⁄0.9.2⁄0.9.3⁄0.9.4⁄2.0), RDF (0.9⁄1.0) and Atom (0.3⁄1.0) feeds with enclosures, plus support for the Media RSS extensions by Yahoo! and the iTunes RSS extensions from Apple. With this new functionality it is now possible to add to the media library:

Audio, image and video podcasts/blogs (look for the podcast icon on audio/video blogs or RSS with enclosures icon on photo blogs and add that URL to the library).

Image feeds such as the ones provided by flickr (look for the RSS 2.0 at the bottom of a flickr web page and add this URL).

Audio and video playlist feeds such as the ones provided by Webjay (look for the podcast RSS icon at the top of a playlist page and add this URL to the library).

The Internet feeds can include any media URL and not just HTTP, so e.g. feeds with live audio/video channels (such as the CSPAN feed) are also supported.

Some sample audio and video feeds are now distributed with TVersity and will be updated automatically from time to time with new content submitted by TVersity users.

Support for Image URLs, you can now add any photo URL to the library just like audio and video URLs .

The media server can now act as a proxy for HTTP URLs (both live and on demand) and by doing that overcome the limitations of many media hubs with regard to HTTP URLs from the Internet as opposed to the home network.

Transcoding of additional media formats

Limited support for local FLV (Macromedia Flash Video) files is now available, only local files (not URLs) that use flv codecs supported by ffdshow will work. This feature is still experimental but it already allows feeds with FLV enclosures such as the ones from Reuters to work as long as the enclosures were already downloaded.

M3U and PLS files can now include any media and not just audio. They can even includes a mix of audio, images and video file both local and remote.

Very large M3U and PLS files (such as the ones from Magnatune) are now supported.

RSS/Atom with enclosures can now be used for the creation of playlists as well. This allows one to use metadata beyond the basic title and duration that M3U/PLS support. Playlist editing can be done in any RSS editor that supports enclosures such as the Firefox/Thunderbird RSS Editor add-on.

You can also create playlists of playlists in either of M3U/PLS/RSS/ATOM formats.

DLink DSM media hubs

Fixed incompatibility issues with firmware 1.07 that caused the DSM to hang when playing the second video file.

Added support for serving SRT subtitles, which the DSM can natively render.

Configuration

The media server is no longer refreshing the library each time it is started, except the first time it is executed after a new install.

The default refresh policy is now configured to be once a day at midnight and it is now possible to control the start time of the refresh and not just the time interval between refresh sessions.

More sophisticated refresh policies can be accomplished by using a third party scheduler (such as the task manager in Windows) in conjunction with the now up-to-date MShare utility.

Misc.

MShare can now handle tags, image URLs and audio/image/video feeds.

Restore compatibility with the NOXON (0.9.0.4 broke it).

Version 0.9.0.4a (March 7, 2006)

Content Guides - the content guides were updated and fixed to make them compatible with some media hubs that could not handle them.

Bug Fixes and more

It is now possible again to use the DLink DSM 320, Cidero and TVersity together.

Artist information is now properly displayed on the Philips Streamiums.

Some MOV video files that were wrongly identified as audio only and therefore were transcoded to an audio format are now properly detected as video files.

Playlist (M3U and PLS) can now have UNC pathnames and the server will handle it properly.

Sharing a folder and one of its subfolders will now index the items under both folders and not just under the first one that was shared.

Sharing playlists prior to the folders from which the playlists items originated will no longer result in the items appearing only under the playlists.

Indexing by folders now places all the containers at the top and then the items, this makes navigation easier as items and containers are not mixed.

Real Media files with extension “.rm” are now properly recognized as video files.

Version 0.9.0.3 (December 23, 2005)

Fixed the export and import of shared files/folder/urls to avoid opening a hidden command window since this triggers antispyware software to block this operation (which resulted in the installer hanging).

The export and import is now incremental meaning that one can import into a non empty media library and the imported data will be merged into the library.

Version 0.9.0.2 (December 21, 2005)

GUI

Added the TVersity logo and icons (thank you Frode for your excellent work and for all the time invested in creating these for us).

A version of the GUI that is compatible with Macromedia Flash version 6 is included. It is intended for use with PocketPC and it can be accessed from the URL http://ip:port/flash6.swf, where ip is the ip address of the computer running TVersity and port is the port used by TVersity (the default would be 41952).

Installer - upgrading to version 0.9.0.2 will now preserve the tags created in previous versions and not just the URL and title. Please be sure to uninstall only version 0.7 or older before installation, versions 0.8 or 0.9 should not be uninstalled.

Support for additional media hubs - added a profile for the Pinnacle showcenter 200. Please note that this profile was created while working with an end user (thank you Alex for working with us to create it) and was never officially tested in Tversity’s labs.

Transcoding of additional media formats

Added support for Monkey Audio (APE) and Musepack (MPC). Please note that directshow filters that can handle these formats are required for this feature to work (check the FAQ for links to such filters).

Added support for Karaoke. The media server can now transcode CDG and BIN (CD images containing CDG+MP3) files and turn them into a video on the fly. After sharing such files, look for them in the video section of your media library and not in the audio section. Please note that directshow filters that can handle CDG and BIN are required for this feature to work (not all CDG filters are compatible with TVersity so be sure to read the FAQ).

Bug fixes

XML escaping issues in file and folder pathnames that prevented proper sharing of these pathnames were eliminated.

The inability to navigate to the TVersity guides on the Philips Streamium was fixed.

The issue with a large number of shared URLs not being properly displayed in the GUI has been solved.

Version 0.9.0.1 (December 14, 2005)

GUI is here

GUI can be run from the start menu, the desktop shortcut icon or inside any browser. The latter is done by putting into the address bar the URL http://ip:port/, where ip is the ip address of the computer running TVersity and port is the port used by TVersity (the default would be 41952).

The new GUI allows one to easily change the server configuration and has detailed description of each possible configuration option and its implications. It also allows one to totally shut off the transcoding, or to have it always run, to have it run only when needed (this is the default and recommended setting).

GUI has many new sharing related features that are not supported from the command line, this includes:

Tagging: Each shared URL can have a set of tags associated with it. These tags allow one to organize the URLs such that one can easily browse all the URLs that have a certain tag associated with them. Tags can be hierarchical, this is done by using a dot to separate the different hierarchy levels. This make them a true generalization of folders as one can create an arbitrary hierarchy just like with folders but any item can have many tags associated with it, while with folders any item can reside only in one folder. As far as we know TVersity is the first to ever come up with the notion of hierarchical tags and to implement it, so remember when everyone else adopts it, you saw it here first.

Selective folder sharing: When sharing a folder one can decide if to share any subset of audio, video, images. Later on one can turn on and off each one of these and the server will quickly update the media library to reflect this change.

Safe library reset: Resetting the media libraray from the GUI is different from the command line in that it keeps all the shares intact and just reconstructs the library. The command line opertion is still available but it should probably be used only in very extreme situations,as it deletes the exisitng media library and creates an empty one instead losing all the existing shares and therefore requiring the user to manually re-enter them.

Sharing URLs with others: URLs can now be indicated as public or private. Public URLs will be shared with other users in future releases, this will allow the TVersity community to exchange valuable URLs. The tagging will also make it possible to browse public URLs by tags and search them by keywords.

Any share, including files and folders, can now be given a name. As far as files and folders are concerned, this name is currently used only in the GUI to refer to this share. This is in unlike URLs, for which the name is used both in the GUI and when browsing your media library on your TV.

Media Management Improvements

Containers in the media library that used to have items in them but no longer do are now deleted from the library. This means that if, for example, the last song from a certain genre was removed from the library and now this particular genre has no child items, then at that point this genre will be removed.

The sorting of audio and video URLs is now by their name and not (as it was before) by the order in which they were added, this should make it easier to find the URLs you are looking for as long as you properly name them.

The sorting of items by creation date is now descending and not ascending as before, meaning that the newset stuff will always be at the top.

Refreshing the media library now also refreshes the URLs, therefore URLs of metadata files (like m3u, pls, asx etc.) that have their content periodically changed will be up to date in the media library.

Transcoding of additional media formats

Added support for Windows Media Video/Audio URLs that can stream only via RTSP.

Added support for OGM, the new Divx file extension (from version 6 Divx has its own file extension and it is not longer using the AVI extension) and the file extension M2v.

Windows Installer - the installer now supports upgrading from a previous release, so users of V0.8 are encouraged not to uninstall it before installing V0.9. In fact this is the only way to have your audio and video URLs copied over to the new installation so that you will not need to re-enter them manually. Please be advised that unistalling V0.8 will result in the deletion of all the audio and video URLs so please beware.

Bug fixes

Sharing Winamp playlists that have items with absolute path names but without the drive letter now works.

Updated the Roku Soundbrdige profile such that WAV files provided by the server will be recognized correctly and accepted by the Soundbridge. This also fixes issues with the transcoding of audio files (such as WMA lossless) with the Soundbridge.

The WAV file generated by the media server (when transcoding from some other format) is now more compatible and works with additional media hubs (such as the Roku Soundbridge). Also unlike before it plays in Windows Media Player.

The delay between trasncoded audio files had been reduced from 10-20 seconds to less than 1 second.

The sharing process now does not abort if one folder or file can’t be opened, instead these files/folders are simply skipped, with a new attempt made at them each time the library is refreshed.

The sharing process can now properly handle HTTP URLs pointing to non WMA/WMV/ASF files (e.g. MP3, MPEG, MP4, etc.), however these URLs will still be always transcoded. Future releases will simply download the files if no transcoding is necessary and will serve these files to the media hub as they are being downloaded.

Some video files (such as RMVB) were not correctly handled in terms of their mime types and for that reason were not played by some media hubs, this issue is now fixed.

Fixed some issues related to running as a Windows service that resulted in a hanging computer after a reboot (only in some rare cases).

When transcoding media with strict compliance to MPEG1 VCD standard or MPEG2 DVD standard (i.e. when the strict flag is turned on for the relevant profile in profiles.xml), the aspect ratio header of the file is now properly set so that devices that require it (such as the Siemens M740AV DVB-T receiver) will decode it correctly.

Version 0.8.0.3 (September 12, 2005)

Fixed the periodic rebuffering problem with the Philips Streamiums (over wireless it was every 2-3 seconds and over a wired connection it was every 50-60 seconds). This fix should also improve the performance over wireless connections and/or when streaming from network shares, for all media hubs.

Fixed MShare crashing when sharing a URL without providing a title.

Modified the media server behavior with the Roku Soundbridge to transcode WMA lossless audio files since the Soundridge does not natively support this format.

Fixed some typos.

Version 0.8.0.2 (September 9, 2005)

MShare

You can now use the URL sharing feature for MP3 streams and for HTTP URLs that point to PLS or M3U playlist files.

Added indexing of music by genres and then by albums (as per some users request).

Moved the indexing by folders entry under Audio, Photo and Video to be the first one to appear after the “All” and the “Playlist” entries.

The media library refresh interval has been increased from 30 minutes to 8 hours. This is to avoid too much network traffic for users that have many network shares, which are slower to refresh and therefore with the previous setting the media server could always be refreshing. Users that need to refresh more often can modify config.xml as they see fit.

Bug fixes

The corruption of the media library as a result of MShare and the Media Server modifying it simultaneously has been fixed. Please refer to the FAQ to learn more about temporary error messages that can be displayed when running MShare when the media server is synchronizing the media library. In any case it is safe now to do so, in the worst case one of them will output an error message requesting the user to try again since the media library is locked.

The errors in shutting down the media server service while it is refreshing the media libraries have been eliminated.

Sharing of folders that have apostrophe in their name now works and apostrophe characters in subfolder names no longer appear as ‘.

Quicktime MOV files and Ogg Vorbis files are now placed in the correct audio/video category.

Version 0.8.0.1 (September 2, 2005)

Media Library

The media library has been rewritten and is no longer an XML file residing in memory during runtime, but rather a lightweight database residing on the disk.This means that ProgrammingGuide.xml has been eliminated. Users that added online content to this file manually should backup their additions prior to installing this version and read about the new features of MShare designed to allow them to do the same with much less effort.

The memory consumption of the media server no longer depends on the size of the media library and is now much smaller.

The media library is designed to handle 100,000 items and more; Sharing is much faster and browsing is as fast as before.

The media server is now showing the shared media as it is shared and it is no longer necessary to wait until the sharing (of potentially very large folders) is complete before browsing the items. This also means that it is no longer required to restart the media server after a share process, and that stopping a share process in the middle is not an issue since it can be continued from the same point at a later time.

The library item names are no longer a concatenation of the title tag, track tag, album tag and artist tag but are rather just the title tag and if this tag is missing then the file name (without its extension) is used.

When accessing the media library by folders, the items can now be sorted by the file name and not by their title tag (it depends on the value of the sortFolderByFileName attribute from config.xml, which is true by default). This means that users that have a folder structure that includes a folder for each album and inside this folder their files are named such that the track number appears first, will have their album items sorted by the track number. Please note that changing the value of the sortFolderByFileName attribute affects only shares done from that moment and on. Previous shares remain unaltered, so this decision need to be done prior to sharing.

Users that do not wish the media server to capitalize the ID3 tags (and apply other similar manipulations designed to make the tags more readbale and consistent) can now turn this off by setting the value of the prettyTags attribute from config.xml to false (it is true by default). Please note that changing the value of this attribute affects only shares done from that moment and on. Previous shares remain unaltered.

The media library is now automatically refreshed every certain (configurable) amount of time.

The media library can now include media from CD, DVD, flash memory, or other removable drives. When the media library is refreshed it will automatically remove items that corresponded to previous content of removable drives and will add items that correspond to current content of these drives.

The MShare utility

In addition to adding new shares, the MShare utility can now be used to list these shares, update all of them in one operation or remove one of the shares.

You can type MShare -H for a complete description of the new command line options that were added.

Since the media library is not an editable XML file, it is no longer possible to add new online content in the same (undocumented) method used so far. Instead MShare now allows one to add Windows Media Video or Windows Media Audio URLs along with a title to use for them, these get added to new sections of the media library called “My Online Video” and “My online Audio” respectively. MShare will even automatically extract the first media URL from an ASX file, so unless you need the second or other URL it is no longer necessary to manualy extract the URL from such metafiles..

Support for additional media hubs

Added the Terratec NOXON and the Philips SLA5500 audio players

DLink DSM 320 firmware 1.06 issues:

Fixed live online content to work with this new firmware.

Modified the profile of the DSM to transcode AAC files (to WAV so that no quality loss occurs) since the new firmware eliminated the DSM (undocumented) ability to play AAC.

Transcoding of additional media formats - added support for FLAC, Matroska, Real Audio/video (including rmvb), and Quicktime video on systems that have the necessary directshow filters to decode these formats installed. Please check the FAQ for list of filters and links to their locations on the Web. Real and Quicktime streaming from the Internet is not yet supported.

Online Content

Added thousands of radio stations from around the world accesible by genre, region or language. Some of these stations are MP3 streams and some are WMA. The WMA streams are transocded on the fly to MP3 and therefore should work on all media hubs, the MP3 streams, being already in MP3 format, are provided as is to the media hub. While in theory this should work well with all media hubs, in practice some media hubs are not able to play some of the streams. This is due to limitations in accepting MP3 streams from the Internet (as opposed to accepting them from the media server, which is on the local network).

Removed all the ifilm related videos since they longer work and won’t work due to provisions taken by ifilm to prevent direct linking to their content. Future releases will include alternative sources for movie trailers.

Added the ministry of sound TV and radio stations (the TV seems to be working on and off, when in doubt check their web site and see if it works from there).

Many “TV from around the world” streams that still did not work or stopped working after a while, are now working or removed if their webcasts were dropped by the broadcaster (still many of them work only in certain times of day).

Bug Fixes and more

The memory leak has been fixed.

The media cache area is no longer growing indefinitely but is now contained within certain configurable minimum and maximum sizes.

M3U and PLS playlists that include URLs of MP3 radio stations now work on the Roku Soundbridge.

Indexing a music track that has the same value for the artist and album tags is now done properly.

The forty seconds delay when moving from one track to the next that existed with some media hubs (such as the Terratec NOXON and the Philips SLA5500) has been eliminated.

The capitalization of text extracted from tags is done now better (letter appearing after parenthesis are also capitalized).

The album, artist, and genre tags are now extracted for playlist items.

Sharing of whole drives (e.g. c:) now works.

Sharing of network pathnames is improved and is now more compatible (performance over network shares still needs to be improved).

There is now a file called version.txt in the installation directory that contains the version information.

Version 0.7.0.1 (June 19, 2005)

Support for additional media hubs

The Philips Streamium SL300i/SL400i are now fully supported.

The Roku SoundBridge models M500, M1000 and M2000 are now supported as well. You can even play the audio track of your video files (or of online video channels) on them.

The SMC EZStream and the Gateway ADC 320 are now supported.

The media server has been made more portable across media hubs and is likely to work now with others (that are noit mentioned above) as well.

Choosing the type of media hubs with which the media server need to interact is done during installation.

Online Content

ManiaTV has now a 500 Kbps stream (it seems to be still experimental on their side so the old stream of 300 Kbps was kept).

The top 100 viral videos and the top 100 short films from ifilm were added (some of these are for adults only so please be forewarned).

Many of the ifilm trailers were updated from 200 kbps to 300 kbps, and hundreds of new trailers were added.

Many “TV from around the world” streams that did not work, are now working (still many of them work only in certain times of day).

Added Virgin Radio stations (live from UK).

Media Library Indexing

Nested index names are no longer concatenated with their ancestor names.

Indexing by folder is now hierarchical and not flat.

Configurability

A new configuration file has been added allowing one to configure the behavior of the media server to better match one’s needs. Some examples of the kind of elements that can be configured follow.

The type of media hub with which the server is supposed to interact is now configurable. Currently there cannot be more than one type of media hub in the configuration file but there can be multiple instances of that media hub on the network (of-course different types od media hubs that are compatible with one another to a certain degree may work fine by choosing one of the types). In the future the server will be able to interact with different types of media hubs simultaneously and to detect their type automatically.

The media server can now be configured to transcode audio to WAV so that the quality of lossless formats will be maintained, this is now the default behavior for the DLink DSM 320 (with which the media server is now also capable of automatically detecting WMA lossless files and transcode them, but refrain from transcoding lossy WMAs).

The connection speed of the media server to the media hubs can now be defined in the configuration file such that the bitrate of transcoded media will be adapted accordingly allowing smooth playback over any speed home network (even Wireless B). Moreover the media server can be configured to downsample high bitrate media files that can theoretically be played natively by the media hub but in practice their playback stutters due to their bitrate being too high for the network, again resulting in smooth playback.

The IP address and port on which the media server should listen are now configurable.

Many transcoding related parameters are now configurable, e.g. one can determine the target video resolution when transcoding a video file, this provides a trade-off between quality and speed, meaning that now even slower computers can still successfully do real-time transcoding but to a somewhat reduced quality. Another example is switching the transcoding between two modes, the first mode is optimized for speed by using faster compression schemes and the second is optimized for quality by using slower compressions schemes that can produce a better quality within a given bitrate. This allows for a trade-off between quality, speed and bitrate (which translates to disk space and network speed).

The maximum time period for time shifting live media can now be configured, the default is still 30 minutes.

Bug Fixes

Fixed MShare to properly handle foreign charcaters used in playlist entries and convert them to UTF-8 as required by the UPNP standard, and to properly handle playlists entries that start with a slash character (by prefixing them with the drive in which the playlist file itself resides).

For the DLink DSM320 MP3 files up to 320 Kbps (and not just up to 192 Kbps) won’t be transcoded since it can playh them natively.

Version 0.6.0.2 (May 22, 2005)

Online Content

Added hundreds of TV stations from all over the world (please note that not all of them broadcast 24⁄7 and therefore may be unavailable at certain times).

Fixed the link to the indie movie Star Wars Revelations. The high-res version of this movie is now available for viewing on your TV screen.

Security - the media server now rejects connections originating from outside its network, making it impossible for intruders from the Internet to browse your media (this is not a replacement for a proper router/firewall configuration since wireless networks make it easy for intruders to join your home/office network).